Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

Martin Luther King Jr. showed you can be mindful while being politically engaged

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My favorite King quote is something he wrote about a year before his death:

The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.

That’s powerful stuff coming from a figure whose politics have been defanged and whitewashed into a cartoon of “peace” and “equality.”

I also try to remember that when King was assassinated, he was in Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking Black sanitation workers.

But one of my favorite King ideas is a metaphor he borrowed from a socialist Methodist pastor.

“I’m sure that many of you have had the experience of dealing with thermometers and thermostats,” King said in a sermon he gave many times early in his life.

The thermometer merely records the temperature. If it is 70 or 80 degrees, it registers that and that is all. On the other hand, the thermostat changes the temperature. If it is too cool in the house, you simply push the thermostat up a little and it makes it warmer. And so the Christian is called upon not to be like a thermometer conforming to the temperature of his society, but he must be like a thermostat serving to transform the temperature of his society.

Let’s replace “the Christian” with “humans.”

[Humans] are called upon not to be like a thermometer conforming to the temperature of society, but [they] must be like a thermostat serving to transform the temperature of society.

King was arguing that we must change society rather than only be changed by it. Which is what Karl Marx meant when he wrote, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it.”

Okay, fair enough. We shouldn’t care only about ourselves. It’s our responsibility, as Bernie Sanders put it in his 2020 presidential run, “to fight for someone you don’t know.”

But it gets really interesting when you apply the metaphor to the mind.

There’s a contradiction. On the one hand, being mindful is like being a thermostat. When you realize you’re lost in thought, you bring your attention back to the present moment. When you’re worrying, planning, ruminating, you feel your breath, notice bodily sensations, listen.

Mindfulness is staying steady in the riptide of thoughts. Resting in the center of your experience, at a comfortable temperature of 72 degrees.

But King’s whole point was that we must act. It is our responsibility to change the things that must be changed.

If mindfulness is about staying still with whatever comes up, wouldn’t that make trying to change the world unmindful?

No, because we’re a thermostat. Sometimes, a comfortable 72 degrees isn’t what’s called for. We need to turn up the heat. We need to protest, march, strike. Throw ourselves in the gears of the system.

What’s unmindful—or unwise—is trying to do it all by ourselves. We’re like a teenager complaining about the temperature but lacking the money to pay the heating bill.

That’s a recipe for suffering. As Buddhism’s second noble truth says, suffering comes from grasping on to things we like and pushing away things we don’t like. Wanting to change things that can’t be changed.

Like a furnace in a house, we need resources to turn up the temperature. We need help. We need each other.

That’s what King meant by “a radical redistribution of political and economic power.”

I’m pretty sure you don’t have the wealth of Jeff Bezos or Donald Trump. The 1 percent can change the temperature themselves (and they literally are heating up the planet with their outsized consumption).

But we’re the 99 percent, everyone else. If we’re organized—our power—we can turn up the heat when it’s called for. If we can get past our differences—that were created by the 1 percent, like the concept of race—we can change this society.

I’ll let King have the last word:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. My weekly email newsletter helps you bring mindfulness to work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation transformed my life.

The Capitol riot was traumatic, even if you weren’t there

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Since the white supremacist attack on the Capitol, I’ve been looking for ways to process what happened.

Turns out, what I needed most was poetry. More on that in a second.

The first helpful thing was realizing that what happened was traumatic.

Even though I’m white and experienced it by doomscrolling social media, it triggered my nervous system. Stress hormones flooded my body. My breath shortened. My muscles clenched for protection.

But there was no one to fight or run from. There was nowhere for the stress to go except gnaw at my insides.

“I know many people who feel exhausted, reactive, depressed, hypervigilant, sleepless, cloudy/dazed, and super raw,” tweeted therapist and meditation Ralph De La Rosa. “These are common traumatic reactions.”

This is why compassion has been so important.

When we’re scared, we need unconditional love. We need to be held and told not that everything will be okay but that we are okay, exactly how we are, whatever we’re feeling.

That is what good friends are for. And therapy. They provide what psychologist Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard.”

“For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety,” writes psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. “Being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart.”

I love this Carl Rogers quote: “People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right-hand corner.’ I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”

It’s also been helpful to meditate and move my body.

Unconditional love often isn’t enough. Trauma can stay trapped in the body. “The body,” the title of van der Kolk’s bestselling book says, “keeps the score.”

After the violence, my attention was stuck in my mind. And my mind was stuck in the future, worrying, planning, catastrophizing.

That’s why I couldn’t stop looking at social media. As De La Rosa said, “People were offloading their emotions … by refreshing and doomscrolling as if that was going to do something, as if that was going move something. And it was just the neurochemicals trying to affect the situation, [yet they were] rendered useless.”

Meditation has helped me stay with what’s happening in the present moment. What’s going on in my body. What it feels like to breathe. What it actually sounds like right here, right now, in my Baltimore apartment.

Meditation counters stress by triggering the body to stop releasing stress hormones, slow the heart rate, and deepen breathing.

I’ve noticed that even going for a short walk or stretching can take the edge off. The energy has somewhere to go instead of being redirected inside. Yoga is even better, as it‘s been shown to reset critical brain areas that get disturbed by trauma.

But, if I’m being honest, I have a therapist and plenty of close friends. And I’ve got a halfway decent meditation practice.

I’ve been needing something more. Something bigger. Something to hold not just me but all of us and the violence and trauma and this country’s history in a larger way.

Something that holds Trump and white supremacy accountable. But that also sees the humanity in all the insanity. In a word, something spiritual.

Thank goodness for adrienne maree brown’s poem, which she wrote the morning after the riot. Here’s my favorite part:

things are not getting worse
they are getting uncovered
we must hold each other tight
and continue to pull back the veil
see: we, the body, we are the wounded place

we live on a resilient earth
where change is the only constant
in bodies whose only true whiteness
is the blood cell that fights infection
and the bone that holds the marrow

remove the shrapnel, clean the wound
relinquish inflammation, let the chaos calm
the body knows how to scab like lava stone
eventually leaving the smooth marring scars
of lessons learned

Seriously, go read the whole thing right now.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. My weekly email newsletter helps you bring mindfulness to work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation transformed my life.

Photo by Blink O’fanaye

No, half the country didn’t vote for Trump. But it sure feels like it.

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Ten thousand votes in Arizona. Barely 0.03% of the vote in Georgia. Joe Biden’s margin of victory is — as my West Virginia-born dad says — skinny as a mosquito’s peter.

It really does feel like half the country likes having a racist, misogynist reality TV show star as president. Or they’re willing to tolerate him to “own the libs.”

But are Trump supporters really all that different from me? More on that in a second.

What the facts say

First, here’s what I’m trying to remember when I feel hopeless.

Half the country did not vote for Donald Trump. Around 30 percent did.

More than a third of eligible voters didn’t vote. That’s 78 million people. Some were disenfranchised by restrictive voting policies. But most weren’t convinced the election result would affect their lives.

The Democratic Party wasn’t offering much beyond, “At least we’re not Trump.” Biden only paid lip service to social justice. His campaign followed the lead of its corporate donors and all but ignored the needs of everyday people.

Still, Biden is up in the popular vote by over 5 million and counting. The electoral college is the only reason Trump had an outside shot.

The electoral college was invented to preserve slavery. The Founding Fathers needed a way to make sure the slave-owning Southern states had an equal say. Our political system isn’t broken. It’s working just as it was designed.

Racism is and always has been this country’s defining feature. People who look like me — European settlers — stole this land from indigenous Native Americans. Then they stole workers from Africa to clear and work it. Racism is the “American Blindspot,” wrote historian and author of Black Reconstruction (one of my favorite books) W.E.B Du Bois.

Still, most Trump voters aren’t Confederate flag-waving, QAnon-believing, Ford F-450-driving white supremacists. Many are typical, well-off Republicans who put up with Trumpism for lower taxes and less regulation.

What really calms my nerves, though

But most of all, I’m trying to remember that Trump supporters aren’t all that different from me. They’re not dumber or meaner or less civilized. They just have a different story than I do for why they’re suffering and who’s to blame.

They’ve been conned by the powers that be into blaming poor people and people of color. That’s Trump’s whole game. Turn people’s pain and anger into hatred aimed down rather than up at him and his rich buddies or capitalism itself.

But I know that pain and anger in the Trump supporter’s eyes.

I felt it when my dad got home from working 12-hour shifts delivering packages during the holidays.

When my mom complained about her male colleagues not taking her ideas seriously.

When I worked 12-hour shifts at an air conditioning-less factory one long, hot summer.

When I worked at a restaurant and customers acted like they knew me because they saw my name tag.

When the tech corporation I worked for laid off half the company, many of them my friends.

When a developer bought the artist warehouse I was living in to build condos.

When I read about the Arctic melting at record rates. Or another Black man killed by police.

I know how much powerlessness hurts. How angry it makes me.

I’m just lucky to have learned to blame the system itself. For keeping so many of us powerless, especially those born in the “wrong” neighborhood or with the “wrong” color skin. For allowing Trump-like corporate suits to run the world into the ground.

When I think about this way, the pill is easier to swallow. The distance between me and nastiest Trump supporter doesn’t seem so wide.

That doesn’t mean I’m letting them off the hook

No way I’m going to start giving Trump supporters a pass. I won’t stop calling out their racism. And I’ll keep standing beside those who don’t look like me and are in the cross hairs.

But I’m exhausted from pretending I’m better than them — or anyone else for that matter. It’s not working.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. My weekly emails will help you bring mindfulness to work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe here.

Download my free ebook on how mindfulness meditation transformed my life here.

Photo by Blink O’fanaye